Editor's Note: Getting real about ‘model minorities,’ teacher tech, student health and more

Here’s a corollary to the Butterfly Effect: Drop a pebble in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the waves will ripple outward to touch us all. If chaos theory holds that a butterfly wiggling its wings in the Brazilian rainforest can start a typhoon a half a world away, I say the waters that lap the Pacific Rim can exert a tiny tidal tug on every living thing. I may have gone to school on the shores of Lake Erie, for example, but my first college roommate’s grandfather was an influential exile resisting Mao and his revolution in China, and the children of my Mexican-born wife are second cousins to Guamanian royalty.

Asia extends far beyond the Pacific’s farthest shores, of course, all the way to Turkey and the Middle East. It encompasses more than four dozen countries and 4 billion people—not counting all the Asians who now call the United States their home. Nearly 5 million Californians can trace their ancestry to Asia and the Pacific Islands, and their children account for nearly 12 per cent of our public school enrollment. Conventional wisdom holds that Asian American students dominate the academic honor rolls and university admissions, whether through natural ability, culturally instilled endeavor or some combination of the two. But such broad generalities are almost always misleading, and that one is no exception, as California Schools staff writer Carol Brydolf shows in her story, “Getting Real about the ‘Model Minority’: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Fight Their Stereotype,” starting on page 34.

The state Department of Education generally breaks down the broad Asian American/Pacific Islander demographic into Asians, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders, but the AAPI classification can include as many as 50 different racial and ethnic groups. Some 15 percent of AAPI students are English learners, and some subgroups fall far below average levels of academic achievement.

Recognizing these differences can play a crucial role in determining how to help those struggling students. That’s why the Regents of the University of California next year will start to report application, admission and enrollment data for 23 separate Asian American and Pacific Island student subgroups.

“I did not know many students from Southeast Asia—Hmong, Cambodians and Vietnamese—and I was unaware of all the obstacles they face. These students, along with other students of color, were at the heart of our campaign,” Candice Shikai, who helped persuade UC’s Regents to make the change, told Carol.

“The prevalent model minority myth can make many disadvantaged members of our community invisible to policymakers,” Shikai said. “Collecting data on more Asian American and Pacific Islander groups will result in a more accurate picture of how students are doing.”

How students are doing is Mark Cooper’s concern, too. He’s not just looking at their academic performance, though; the Lake County Office of Education board member and dentist focuses on how our children’s physical health influences their studies.

“All school board members have to be aware of the physical side of students and how it affects their ability to learn,” Cooper told regular contributor Scott LaFee in “Condition Critical: Anemic Student Health Funding Forces Educators to Get Creative” (page 14).

Cooper, a former member of CSBA’s Board of Directors, remains involved in the association through the School Health Advisory Committee, established earlier this year to study student health issues and inform local school boards and administrators about school-related health policies.

The prognosis for adequate funding is troubling, the need for services urgent.

“The budget is pretty precarious,” Ann Rector, coordinator of Pasadena Unified School District’s health programs, told Scott of her district. Thankfully, people like Rector and Cooper—like most education professionals and school governance leaders, come to think of it—step up to the challenge and find a way to make it work. Their example and others can help show the way.

Other educators and governance teams are showing the way to tap into kids’ healthy interest in instant messaging, podcasting and other media that feed the ongoing information revolution. In Newark Unified School District’s Newark Memorial High School, in the San Francisco Bay Area, they’re engaging at-risk students in Web design, graphics, video production and other multimedia—not just keeping them in school, but keeping them on course to college and careers.

“Many of our students had serious attendance and academic problems. Many were on a pathway to dropping out of school,” Loren Pinto, the founding director of the high school’s Media Communications Academy, relates in “Teaching with Technology” (page 24). Instead, “Our graduation rate is near 98 percent. A personal phone call is made the year following graduation, and we were pleased to note that 85 to 90 percent of the students were attending college.”

“Teaching with Technology” marks the debut on our pages of freelance writer Pamela Martineau, but she’s not new to the subject of teaching. Remember those ripples circling out around the Pacific Rim? Pamela’s ridden those waves on both sides of the ocean. She put the high school English teaching credential she earned at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education to work for a year in Wuhan, China. She’s also taught at the Collegio de Caracas, an international school in Venezuela, and she returned this summer from a teaching post at an international school in the Dominican Republic.

Pamela didn’t need all that worldly experience to write this issue’s “Class Acts,” but it didn’t hurt. Our regular sampling of noteworthy local programs looks at how Folsom Cordova Unified School District’s Community Heritage Language Program helps Ukrainian, Russian, Armenian and Spanish-speaking students, and how the Monterey County Office of Education is attracting habitual truants back to school, on pages 12-13.

CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin offers a textbook example, starting on page 5, of the proper use of the future subjunctive mood in his late-summer musings on the state budget imbroglio that remains unresolved as we ready this issue for the press, and guest columnist Joseph A. Aguerrebere, president and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, making the case for his program on page 9.

Thanks for reading!

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.